“Hell’s edges” is
a term meaning penitentiary, like the one in Walla Walla (Bradbury’s
birthplace) Bob Steele breaks out of, pursued at night by bloodhounds and men
with torches, a brilliant opening.

Hitchcock in The
Man Who Knew Too Much has the same gag of a hand reaching out from two
curtains and aiming a pistol. Bradbury places it in a saloon, the sheriff at
the bar is the intended target, Steele sitting happily at a side table draws
and fires a bullet through the assassin’s wrist.

Now he’s a
deputy, in love with the sheriff’s daughter, still in pursuit of the man who
killed his father in a train holdup ten years before, and whose identity he was
unable to discover in prison amongst the gang.

Their leader is a
former Mexican bandit now a respected citizen in the town. Three months later,
the gang is released, a payroll holdup is in the works, and the deputy has to
play both sides. An undercover man from the Secret Service is there to elicit
an explanation from Steele.

Some great
stuntwork provides astounding diversion, and Steele boxes and wrestles a
villain in top form. Very funny material is given to the cast, including George
Hayes as an Irishman.

Riders
of Destiny

One reel of
bare-armed prestidigitation, making ready the supreme magic trick in the last.

Between them,
three reels of postal thefts, ranchers water-starved near out of their land,
price-gouging, murder, and a Secret Service man promised by Washington.

Singin’ Sandy
(John Wayne) rides into Antelope Valley, the burden of his tune is death for
the outlaw.

Joshua trees,
scrub, mountains.

West
of the Divide

The unusual
opening has John Wayne and George Hayes tell the story leading up to this
moment beside the campfire. A man stumbles in from the scrub and collapses, his
last words are of poisoned water.

Bradbury employs
an unusual technique throughout, stretching the limits of sheer Western
storytelling to the maximum of plainness, and exaggeratedly so, because he
wants to spring an abstraction out of all this. The expounded prologue appears
on film in Raoul Walsh’s Pursued, with another intent. Here, in the
course of an hour, Bradbury succeeds at floating an offscreen tale about a man
significantly named Gentry who murdered Ted’s father and left the boy for dead,
while the younger son was raised by an absconded hired hand, and cruelly.

Gentry now
threatens a rancher and his daughter, again for the land. These are themes
directly worked out in The War Wagon and Chisum, but nothing
beats the mysterious and daring way in which Bradbury achieves a full and
complete stylistic expression of his theme by deliberately baring his film to
the utmost.

Blue
Steel

“This is your man
from Sacramento.” R.N. Bradbury is in his element with the artifice and comedy
of the opening scene, and he gives plenty of scope to George Hayes as the
sheriff especially in a fine comical performance with a good deal of nuance.
The story is an incomparable cloak-and-dagger Western about a State agent in
pursuit of The Polka Dot Bandit.

The
Man from Utah

Bradbury is a
true magician of the cinema. It’s more than deadeye continuity and a feel for
local weather, it’s reaching into your ten-gallon hat and pulling up a film out
of nowhere. As soon as Wayne finishes his song and gets off his horse,
Bradbury’s there in town with him, looking for work, dispatching some bad
hombres, and getting his assignment to a crooked rodeo.

And then he tears
into complicated symbolism and furious set-ups, all the while pulling coins out
of your ear while you thought you were slumming on Poverty Row. Watch his dry
preparations (like patter) and payoffs, his build-ups and punchlines, his
dazzling way of action filming, his use of lighting, and above all his
construction.

The
Star Packer

A double-daring
exploit, the desperateness of the situation made light of as “more trouble,
more fun” but revealed in Bradbury’s terse elliptical style with the first
gambit, whereby cash is taken from a stagecoach about to be robbed, leaving the
drivers to be shot by frustrated bandits so that the mysterious leader known as
“Shadow” can be found.

His gang clears
the countryside of prey, and shoots down three sheriffs right in the open
street with no-one the wiser.

The film opens
beside a river, where a cowboy is breaking camp. A canoe is seen upstream, the
cowboy helps its Indian rower ashore, and receives intelligence about the stage
holdup impending in Coyote Canyon. The two men lift the canoe over their heads
to carry it from the water.

This scene of
natural beauty and deceptive appearances is thematic and functional, laying out
several points and the scenic grandeur of the final mêlée, in which the
townsmen led by a government agent attack the gang on its way to maraud the
town with a machine gun hidden in a covered wagon, hell-for-leather through the
desert scrub.

George Hayes
takes the role of rancher Matlock, whose cattle are long gone. He’s thinking of
selling out now, or of buying his niece’s share since she’s out West to claim
her father’s legacy and nowadays it’s “no place for a woman.”

She comes through
the stage holdup unscathed. The cowboy gives her a pistol, and she uses it to
wing a desperado trying to spook her at night but forced to flee with a very
satisfying yowl, while she goes back to sleep with a smile.

The back room at
the saloon holds the secret. The cowboy and Indian inspect it with a flashlight
in total darkness, and find a tunnel leading to a vantage point for
assassinations, a hollow tree stump at the top of the street. The leader
addresses his henchmen from the back of a wall safe in the room, like an oracle
of Pluto. The townsmen set a trap, and an assassin is caught.

The assault on
the town is met, the wagon goes over a cliff and into the river. Shadow swims
out and finds that canoe. The cowboy and Indian ride into the shallows and rope
him right out of it, pulling him along through the water.

Bradbury’s
direction is full of feints befitting his theme (the identity of Shadow is
confirmed by an old hand like a Greek messenger), principally the quiet opening
and sustained underplaying that gives the finale the character of a
well-calculated surprise in view of the depredations and mystery that keep the
surface seething. His whip-pan transitions are characteristic and influential.
A high long shot of a horseman tilts down to track on him as he rides in the
camera’s direction, against a background of scrub desert filling the screen. He
is seen to be the Indian, by way of anticipating Anthony Harvey’s Eagle’s
Wing.

The cowboy scans
the hideout with a pair of binoculars, naming the outlaws he sees to the Indian
beside him, including “Flash Burton, a lifer from Walla Walla,” the director
and screenwriter’s jest.

Rainbow
Valley

John Wayne steps
into the scene wearing nice new duds, says he thinks he’ll buy them, goes to
the counter and selects a six-shooter, pays for the items and a horse ($210),
and asks the way to Rainbow Valley. The shopkeeper points beyond the camera,
says “take the north fork, you can’t miss it.” And that’s it, the Bradbury prestidigitation.

“There’s no road,
only a trail,” the shopkeeper adds, and therein lies a tale. “A cloudburst
washed the road away,” the visitor is told, “and a landslide covered it up.” A
gang prevents every attempt at repairing the road, hoping to force the miners
to sell out cheap.

The cowboy
studied engineering in college, leads a road crew. George Hayes fends off the
gang by flinging sticks of dynamite from his Model T, Nugget Nell. The boss pro
tem of the gang is the town’s leading citizen. He pockets a petition to the
governor for help against the gang and mails instead one asking for the big
boss’s release from prison.

A superb Western,
full of action down to the last minute, with material reflected in The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance, Two Mules for Sister Sara and Pale
Rider.

Lawless
Range

This is the
singing John Wayne (his voice is dubbed by an excellent baritone) in a tale of
multiple deceptions and heroisms. The complications of the plot are
characteristic of R.N. Bradbury, who likes a good joke, as well as numerous
details like the moths around the evening singalong, and the prodigious ease
with which his hero plucks the villain (a hornswoggling banker) off his saddle.

Alias
John Law

His name is something
else, he goes by a nickname, outlaws think he’s a marshal, he does one a favor.

The Kootney Kid
robs the mail, killing a man, and discovers a fortune in oil. All he has to do
is be the heir.

Lip-reading has a
sight to do with it, “old whiskers” is a handy man across a room.